Highlights:

  • The company is introducing the Cisco AI Assistant for Customer Experience, featuring a new beta-tested capability to detect when contact center agents are experiencing burnout and require support.
  • With the latest updates, the company emphasized using AI to impact the customer service market, distinguishing itself from existing AI applications primarily beneficial to knowledge workers and others.

Cisco Systems Inc. is enriching its Webex contact center and video conferencing platform by extending its artificial intelligence capabilities, aiming to enhance productivity for employees, regardless of their location.

Among the latest AI features in Webex is the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex, utilizing generative AI technology to facilitate chatbots and summarization features.Top of Form

Moreover, the company is introducing the Cisco AI Assistant for Customer Experience, featuring a new beta-tested capability to detect when contact center agents are experiencing burnout and require support.

The most compelling capabilities Cisco AI Assistant offers for Webex are the features tailored for contact centers. While Webex is primarily recognized as a collaboration, video calling, and messaging platform, it also offers a dedicated product for contact centers known as Webex Contact Center.

The latest AI features in Webex Contact Center encompass tools for topic analysis, offering insights into the reasons behind customer inquiries and trending topics. Additionally, it will offer suggested responses for agents, where the AI advises them on what to say next. Furthermore, call wrap-up and summarization features are designed to assist in extracting insights once calls are concluded.

Expanding on its capabilities, Webex Contact Center can leverage AI to forecast instances when contact center agents may be experiencing burnout, potentially impacting the quality of their interactions with customers, as explained by the company.

In a blog post, Javed Khan, Senior Vice President, and General Manager of Cisco Collaboration, mentioned that managers can promptly recognize when an agent is becoming fatigued and respond by removing them from call queues, allowing them to take a break.

These updates arrive amidst stiff competition for Cisco in the collaboration and contact center tools markets, as rival platforms like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom are all integrating AI features. While capabilities like meeting summaries have become standard in collaboration tools, Cisco believes its contact center updates will set its platform apart from competitors.

With the latest updates, the company emphasized using AI to impact the customer service market, distinguishing itself from existing AI applications primarily beneficial to knowledge workers and others.

However, Cisco is not neglecting its collaboration tools, which are being augmented with real-time translation of messages in chat spaces and messaging channels. Until the recent update, Webex supported translation, albeit exclusively for video meetings. Now, it’s being rolled out more extensively across Webex, offering support for an extensive array of over 100 languages, the company announced.

New Hardware

Cisco also introduced a couple of new hardware devices for collaboration.  These include the new Cisco Board Pro G2, characterized as a “touch collaboration device” for video conferences, and the Cisco Desk Phone 9800, which integrates Webex’s collaborative tools into a network-optimized device.

According to the company, the latest hardware will support the burgeoning back-to-office trend within enterprises. The company referenced a recent global survey of over 14,000 employees at over 3,000 companies across 19 countries, revealing that 80% of employers now mandate their employees to return to the office, either part-time or full-time.

Cisco stated that the new hardware is designed to align with this trend, facilitating “hot swap” desks, where employees utilize shared desks as needed rather than having dedicated desks. The Cisco Desk Phone 9800 is well-suited for such scenarios, enabling users to swiftly log in and out of the phone, granting access to their private messages, and more.